I’ve been sunning* Solus as guest in a Parallels virtual machine on a macOS Sierra 10.12.4 host for a couple of months now, and I am delighted and impressed, so impressed I bought the company** wanted to install this on Apple iron. Solus installed beautifully on an 2010 Lenovo X201 and on a new and cheap and plastically Dell Inspiron 14-3452, so it should have no probs installing on a mid-2012, 15.4″ Hi-Res MBP. Right? Right? Wrong!

Still playing with Solus OS, and liking it more and more. The eopkg repository of software is a little thin in comparison to the likes of Debian-based apt-get and Arch’s AUR, but most of the things I want are there. And if they are not there I am thinking maybe I should review my needs… I am in the process of planning for a life without OS X/MacOS after all, so a prefect time for reflection. This is also part of the reason I am attracted to Solus… because not everything is there, and because not everything is answered by a quick google search, I have to take some effort to actually find things out again. Some nostalgia there.

Cloudage

Librevault is… “transfers data directly from one device to another. You can use it in your local network, and it will work even without Internet access.” So not exactly cloud storage. In fact not even close to that. So why do I think I need it? I don’t. But I wont know until I try. Chances are I can get away with continuing with Dropbox, but since I am working on a major change of OS I might as well kinda think about previous tools and workflows and so on. Anyway there is no librevault in the Solus repository. Compiling time!

Not to flog a dead horse, but what follows is what worked for me, soup to nuts. Playing with librevault will have to wait a few days, cause the weather is awesome and I’ve a potato patch to dig out of raw sod up the orchard, Besides rclone and Google drive are working for what I need *at the moment*… and all that is, is, primarily, syncing files from the MacOS partition to the Solus partition. Google drive will have to go though when the time is right.

Now, do I go to the trouble of packaging this? Other’s who better know what they are doing in this area will prolly get it done soon enough, but why not give it a shot, eh? If I am going to be living with Solus I might as well get to know her a little better.

tl;dr

I feel that after ten years I can no longer countenance the purchase of a new Apple laptop should my existing machine shit the bed. All that nonsense associated with the race to thinness and the resultant lack of expandability of the newer machines, where everything is soldered or glued into place, has me pretty upset. Oh, and the OS itself has been getting more annoying with each release since Snow Leopard. So I am planning for a day without OS X/ MacOS. After a few distro trials (ongoing) I’ve come down to:

Problem: iPhone 5, iOS: 10.2.1 (14D27) will not mount under Solus OS.

iPhones, generally, used to mount fine prior to the iOS 10 release. The developers of

libimobiledevice

have rectified this, but many down stream distos have not quite caught up. Solution is to build oneself. Or wait. I didn’t want to wait…. in large part because Solus’s packaging system eopkg is completely rewritten and not based on AUR or apt-get I wanted to get to poke around it some more.

My hand-compiling of this is probably moot since Solus, being a rolling release, will eventually catch up. It probably will have by the time any reads this.